"
Meantime the Nationalist leaders had been submitting Mr. Lloyd George's
proposals to their own people, and on the 10th of June Mr. Redmond made
a speech in Dublin from which it appeared that he was submitting a very
different proposal to that explained by Carson in Belfast. For Mr.
Redmond told his Dublin audience that, while the Home Rule Act was to
come into operation at once, the exclusion of the six counties was to be
only for the period of the war and twelve months afterwards. That would,
of course, have been even less favourable to Ulster than the terms
offered by Mr. Asquith and rejected by Carson in March 1914. Exclusion
for the period of the war meant nothing; it would have been useless to
Ulster; it was no concession whatever; and Carson would have refused, as
he did in 1914, even to submit it to the Unionist Council in Belfast.
Mr. Lloyd George, who must have known this, had told him quite clearly
that there was to be a "definite clean cut," with no suggestion of a
time limit. There was, however, an idea that after the war an Imperial
Conference would be held, at which the whole constitutional relations of
the component nations of the British Empire would be reviewed, and that
the permanent status of Ireland would then come under reconsideration
with the rest.
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